African farmers must do more to beat climate change

Alister Doyle in Reuters: African farmers are finding new ways to cope with droughts, erosion and other ravages of climate change but need to develop even more techniques to thrive in an increasingly uncertain environment, scientists said on Friday.

Smallholders have started to plant more drought-resistant and faster-growing crops to keep the harvests coming in, according to a survey of 700 households in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania.

"The good news is that a lot of farmers are making changes," said Patti Kristjanson, who heads a program on climate change, agriculture and food security at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi and led the study. "So it's not all doom and gloom ... but much more needs to be done," she told Reuters.

Farmers, backed by researchers and international donors, needed to find better ways to store rain water, increase the use of manure and bring in hardier crops like sweet potatoes, she said.

In the past decade, 55 percent of households surveyed said they had taken up faster-growing crop varieties, mainly of maize, and 56 percent had adopted at least one drought-tolerant variety, according to the findings in the journal Food Security. Fifty percent of the households were planting trees on their farms - helping to combat erosion, increase water and soil quality and bring in new crops like nuts….

A roadside market in Kenya, shot by Angela Sevin, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license